Unlike most hate mail, the messages Calgary writer Vivek Shraya began receiving in the fall of 2017 were not anonymous.

In some ways, that made them even scarier, she says. Clearly this person felt emboldened, Shraya says, and so convinced of “their passion for me to die” that he felt anonymity was not necessary.

From the very first email, the writer included his name and even his address. The messages themselves were strange in tone, a combination of rambling religious references drawn from Hinduism and something that almost sounded like paternal concern. But there were also veiled and not-so-veiled death threats.

“Your name was shouted at my place as someone who has to die,” read one missive.

“As long as you stay within the lines of Dharma, you will have a full life!!” read another.

“Your mother wants to hear sweet words from you. Tell her you are not a woman,” was another.

“I think one of the reasons why the letters stuck with me is that not only were they strange, but they also referenced my family — my mother was mentioned a couple of times — and they mentioned their own mother,” says Shraya, in an interview from her home in Calgary. “So there was this element of family that was conjured. But they also used, from what I could tell, either Hindi or Sanskrit text, which immediately had particular cultural and religious significance for me. It was what they were saying about me finding a wise holy man in Hinduism to assist me with returning to my true gender or whatever. Using that kind of language through Sanskrit or Hindi had a particular resonance with me as someone who grew up in a Hindu environment.”

The fear, and the fascination, that Shraya had about these digital encounters form the basis of Death Threat, the graphic novel she created with Toronto artist Ness Lee. Through lyrical, colourful and often surreal illustrations, Shraya recounts not only the harassment but also the process of putting the book together. It can be funny, scary and thought-provoking, often all on the same page. Shraya uses her personal story to paint a larger picture of how hate can travel on the Internet and challenge myths about who or what the average online “troll” has become.

An image from the graphic novel Death Threatjpg

An assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Calgary, Shraya is a multi-disciplinary artist whose most recent work was the insightful and occasionally chilling memoir, I’m Afraid of Men. She came out as transgender in 2016. Sadly, fear and harassment have long been a part of her life.

But the uniqueness of these letters were more disturbing than any of the other hate mail she had received. They also seemed to lend themselves to the graphic-novel format. Over the years, Shraya has written novels, a children’s book, poetry collections, short stories and performed music as both a solo act and as Too Attached, the duo she has with her beatboxing brother Shamik Bilgi. But she had never written a graphic novel before.

“They possessed, for me as a reader, a very visual quality,” she says. “They are not the average hate mail. I found it really difficult not to picture some of the things this individual was saying. ‘My mother’s neighbours went Vivek hunting in the forest,’ — it was really hard not to imagine something like that because it was so bizarre.”

Lee’s illustration of that strange idea depicts Shraya running from black-outfitted, gun-toting pursuers. But much of the imagery is more surreal, particularly when depicting some of the religious ideas put forth by the harasser, such as the recommendation that Shraya seek out a Vaidya to diagnose her and put her in a mud hut where she “will see the earth, the atmosphere, the outer space” and be “absorbed by your physical gender. Likely that is male.”

While the letter-writer did reveal his name and address, Shraya never did determine exactly who he was. Nor did she go to the police about the harassment. At one point in Death Threat, the main character imagines going to the authorities only to be arrested for “false accusation.”

“The truth is, there is a really contentious history between queer people and the police,” she says. “As a trans person, the last thing I want is to do is be on the police radar. I don’t completely trust that anything would be really done about it. I never felt it was something I was comfortable doing.”

So Shraya’s tormenter stays somewhat undefined in the novel, often an amorphous shape-shifting entity lurking in the shadows.

“One of the interesting challenges for us was how do we portray this individual,” Shraya says. “We lovingly refer to this character as ‘the blob.’ From the beginning I had this idea that this character would morph and change, to keep challenging the idea of who a troll is. At the beginning it’s more of a fiery type figure and towards the end it’s like this white, shadowy figure. It was also to suggest, without sounding too melodramatic, that the trolls are amongst us.”

In fact, some of the more amusing illustrations and ideas in the book come from that idea. What is a modern troll? Lee uses images that recall those vintage wild-haired troll figures, decking them out in various professional guises to suggest they can be anyone: bankers, doctors or grad students.

Which points to a bigger theme in Death Threat.

“Trolls are no longer a random person who, as the character in my book says, live in their mom’s basement somewhere,” Shraya says. “A lot of people feel like that is acceptable behaviour, which is particularly frightening.”

Death Threat by Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee will be available. Shraya will be at the Calgary Public Library on May 22 at the Calgary Public Library on May 22.